


Be Home For Christmas

by intrikate88



Category: Tomorrowland (2015)
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Fluff, F/M, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-09 02:57:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5522840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrikate88/pseuds/intrikate88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 1964, Frank is spending his first Christmas without his family, but sometimes home is found in other ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Be Home For Christmas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RecessiveJean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecessiveJean/gifts).



The winter of 1964, Athena found Frank staring morosely out the window at the snow falling gently over the city. He had been more subdued than usual the past few days, but she had chalked it up to neurochemical shifts based on circadian rhythms, as the point of winter solstice had just come and gone. But despite this perfectly reasonable explanation, she still felt compelled to ask. “Is something the matter, Frank?"

He let out a sigh that sounded like it had been building in wait of her asking, and she almost wished she had asked sooner, to spare him the effort of saving it all up. “It’s Christmas Eve."

She reviewed her records. “Yes. One of the many midwinter holidays, this one celebrated by the Christian denominations."

Frank looked away from the window to squinch his face at her curiously, then dismissed whatever confusion he considered uttering in favor of what he was going to say. “My family isn’t really much for church, but I’ve… I’ve never been away from them at Christmas before. Dr. Nix said there isn’t a way to arrange to go home for Christmas, so… it’s just me this year."

Athena sat next to him and they looked out the window together. There wasn’t a lot of snow, but it was beginning to build up. “I’ve never observed Christmas before,” she confided. “But even if I did, I don’t have anyone to celebrate with, either."

“It’s not that great,” Frank said, his tone indicating that he didn’t quite believe it himself; “last Christmas I got a pair of socks and a balsa wood plane, and I had just put it together when Dad stepped on it. He’d had too much eggnog. Well, there wasn’t really any eggnog in what he was drinking. And then the turkey we had for supper was burned.” He brightened up a little. “My aunt Barbara came, though, and me and my cousins had a bonfire in the yard. That was when I showed them how flammable some of the fuels I was considering for my jetpack were.” 

Athena smiled. That was probably exciting. 

Frank looked at his watch. “I have to go meet Bobby for study group,” he said. “On _Christmas Eve_ , I have study group.” He sighed again. 

Athena gave him a sympathetic look as he left, swinging his bag over his shoulder. In all the months he had been in Tomorrowland, she’d never seen him so unhappy about being away from the home he had come from. Indeed, he didn’t seem that sad about his actual home, but rather some nebulous concept of the holiday and having people to celebrate it with, even if they were people who didn’t understand him. 

She started reviewing her American cultural references.

*~*~*~*~*

The next morning before dawn, Athena was waiting when Frank rolled over and woke up. He blinked sleepily at her, then shot up and sat staring at her.

She didn’t think she looked that unusual. She had found a red jumpsuit in her size, and a big black belt that she looped twice around her middle, and a red stocking cap. The white curly costume beard she was wearing might have been a little overboard. Maybe that’s what he was staring at. “Ho, ho ho,” she said, solemnly. 

“What the hell, Athena?” said Frank.

“No, you’re supposed to say _Merry Christmas_ ,” she patiently told him. 

“I don’t know _what_ I’m supposed to say to this,” Frank countered. 

“Well, then come on, I have something to show you."

At her command, Frank slid out of bed and slipped a sweater over his head. They padded down the student resident hall in bare feet, barely making a sound while everyone slept in their rooms. Athena led him upstairs, to one of the smaller study rooms that wasn’t usually used because it was out of the way. Frank stopped at the door and took in the sight. 

Athena felt very accomplished. She was sure she had gotten everything right, or at least, right enough to count. She didn’t have a fir tree from the woods, but she did get a conical-shaped shrubbery from some city landscaping, after checking that her protocols did not prevent her from stealing shrubbery. Nobody had thought to include that command, so she was fine. She had raided the optics labs for solar-battery-powered LEDs to stick in the tree, and a bunch of stripped copper wire pieces to use as tinsel. The ornaments were just test tubes that she had filled up with bits of colored paper, but she thought they looked okay. She’d made a star for the top from discarded mirror shards that the scientists using lasers had thrown away. 

And under the tree, she had placed wrapped presents. 

“Wow…” Frank whispered, putting his hands over his mouth. 

“Did I get it right?” she asked, suddenly anxious. She had been very thorough. It was just that there should be a crackling Yule Log, and she wasn’t permitted to set things on fire indoors or without a specific command in limited situations. There was also no fireplace, and while she had taken a pair of nylon stockings from one of Dr. Nix’s colleagues who had left them and several skirt buttons in his office, she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with a stocking, so she’d put it on the tree instead. It had to hang from something, that part seemed clear.

Frank finally stepped forward, falling to his knees in front of the tree and picking up a box to shake slightly. “Um, maybe don’t shake that—“ Athena said. 

You were supposed to buy presents for people, but Athena didn’t have any money. 

“Wow, you wrapped these good,” Frank said. Of course she had; she wrapped them with machine-like precision, because how else would she wrap them? Frank continued, “I’m not sure I can… actually open them? They’re taped shut _really well_.” He tried for a few more minutes to rip the paper off the boxes with his fingernails. “Or maybe you can just tell me what they are, since it’ll be awhile until I get them open,” he joked.

Or maybe it wasn’t a joke. She was never sure if his jokes were supposed to be funny. “No, they’re supposed to be surprises until you open them."

“One sec,” Frank said, and raced out of the room. Athena waited for two hundred and six seconds until he returned, proudly holding up a small pocketknife. With this, he was able to cut apart the wrapping on her presents, and she was proud of his ingenuity. She liked when he solved things.

Athena couldn’t buy any presents, but she gave him several tubes of enamel from the lab where her maintenance was done; the enamel was used to color-designate functions of her inner functions, and she had taken some of the colors that she thought were pretty and could be useful for maintaining herself one day. Another present was the telescoping lens that used to be inside her head, before her optical interface upgrades; she’d removed the eye-lens from the end, but it still functioned for looking across distances. But it was delicate, and not braced for shock like her head was, so it shouldn’t be shaken in case some of the glass lenses inside came loose. She also gave him two canisters of fuel for his jetpack. They had come from the supply he had ready access to, but strictly speaking he _did_  need them, and the problem of whether or not to give people what they already had was ranked as lower priority than giving people what they wanted and needed.

“Is it alright?” Athena repeated.

“It’s perfect,” Frank said, and grinned at her. She grinned back. He was happy, and it was because she had made him a Christmas. He got up and hugged her tightly, and she hugged him back, but not as tightly because she was quite a bit stronger than him, and he was breakable.

“But why are there a pair of pantyhose on the tree?” Frank asked, next to her ear.

“I don’t know,” she answered honestly.

*~*~*~*~*

By Christmas the next year, 1965, Frank had found out that she was audio-animatronic. He had gone through stages of anger, betrayal, sadness, and arguing, almost like he thought of her as someone who had died, but not really. But that was months ago, and he had apologized for being an ass, and explained that he didn’t mind that she wasn’t a human, just that she hadn’t told him the truth. She had had an argument with Dr. Nix that her protocols should be expanded to allow her to tell the truth now that any blinded experiment regarding Frank’s interactions with an AA was over, and after annoying Dr. Nix greatly and over an extended period of time, she had won out. Sometimes she still wondered if Frank regarded her the same way now that he knew the truth. It was very important to her that she was able to stay with him, to work on his projects with him, and to make sure he didn’t lose his sense of hope, even when things didn’t work.

That year, he didn’t even ask Dr. Nix to go back to New York for Christmas. Dr. Nix had been very discouraging on the subject of young recruits being indoctrinated with what he called “unenlightened ideas” and also, Frank had an experiment to monitor at regular intervals that he would miss if he left. Despite that, Athena was surprised when Frank found her early in the morning on December 25th and took her hand, leading her back to his room. 

He had set up a tree in his room, a real (if scrawny) pine tree, and hung painted glass globes from its branches. Her mirror-star from last  year, though, he had kept for the top. 

Frank pushed a box into her hands. “I got you a present,” he said.

“But I didn’t get you anything,” Athena said. She had done more research after last year (and figured out that nylon stockings were the wrong type of stocking for tradition. Also, Dr. Nancy Jones had asked for her stockings back) and knew that an exchange of gifts was how it worked. 

Frank smiled crookedly, then untied the ribbon from the box in her hands, and tied it in a bow around her wrist. “I thought I was gonna lose my best friend this year,” he said. “I thought you were only my friend because someone programmed you to be. But you’re not. You’re you. I don’t need anything else."

This time, she reached to hug him first. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“Merry Christmas, Athena,” he whispered back. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope this brings you some Christmas joy! I know your letter didn't specify anything about the holidays, but I thought you might enjoy some of Frank and Athena as children, and their friendship. Merry Christmas!


End file.
